


Changes

by Tammany



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Fantasy, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-21
Updated: 2015-02-21
Packaged: 2018-03-14 09:02:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3404936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A sketch of a story. First drafty. I think this one I'm going to pull out of Sherlock and rewrite as a non-fanfic piece, for submission. But I like the key elements, and want to think about what to do to keep the things I like, including the different relationships between the brothers, and between Lestrade and the brothers.</p><p>Hope you like.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Lestrade was a man for fire escapes. Someone like Mycroft had balconies, no doubt. Sherlock had rooftops and alleys. John? John had comfy little cafes and pubs. Lestrade had fire escapes. He killed houseplants on fire escapes, or managed to urge spindly tomato plants through London summers, getting a few wan, uncertain fruits off the plant before they, too, died. He ignored species interactions by feeding both stray cats and pigeons on fire escapes. He snuck out of his flats over the years to have a fag on the sly, or to suck down a beer on a slow afternoon. He sat out on the fire escape in a thick wool jumper with a shawl-neck collar, nursing a Viking-sized stein of hot tea on his fire escape after a long night closing a case.

 

He'd kissed his first girl on a fire escape. Been kissed by his first boy. Fought with his ex. Cried when even his ex was gone.

 

So it probably should not have been a surprise when yet another life-change came to him via his fire escape. Especially when change was heralded by Sherlock.

 

It should probably have been winter. It should probably have been raining. It should probably have been night, or those desperate hours of morning when the stars still wheel in the heavens and constellations seem to portend crushing futures. Sherlock should have been wearing the Belstaff, hem flapping at his shins.

 

Instead it was early on a Saturday morning, soon after Lestrade had accepted what he knew would be his final official, public promotion in the Met, to a position as an official liaison between MI5 and NSY--a formal recognition of the work he'd done for years. He had, in his own odd way, joined the world Mycroft Holmes owned and reigned over--the world of the shapers and overseers. At 54 he was growing too old for the street, and was being carefully guided toward a prestigious career in analysis and logistics.

 

The very idea was boring to the point of tears. It promised long, safe years of patient behind-the-scenes plotting over a computer screen, without ever feeling the wind off the Thames or the gritty crunch off London dirt under the soles of his shoes as he paced a crime scene. He admitted--these days he was wasted in the field. Younger men and women should be where he'd been, as he used his years of experience to ensure they had better leadership, from someone who'd stood in their shoes. But, oh, God, the boredom...

 

So he was not exactly unwilling to play dawn host to the very prince of boredom himself. Seeing that long, lean figure out on his fire escape, back turned to the window, hair fluttering in the rising wind, his heart lifted.

 

He made up not one, but two Viking-sized steins of tea, just the way Sherlock liked them--strong and sweet and milky and hot. He curled a knuckle, and rapped the window, and when Sherlock spun, he raised the mugs, and nodded to indicate he could come out with them, if Sherlock liked.

 

The younger man stared at him, eyes shadowed, face seeming gaunt. He'd aged, over the years. He no longer looked as eternally, eerily youthful as he once had: elfin, angelic, wraithlike. Haunting. Over time he'd grown a bit more mature--a skeletal manliness that defied easy description. He was like James Bond playing Death's Angel.  He studied Lestrade, his blue eyes spitting intelligence and distress and intense control. He nodded, and reached out with slim, spidery hands to help haul open the window. Lestrade handed the mugs out, then crept out himself. He settled, hips firm on the window sill.

 

"What's new," he asked, after taking his first long pull of tea.

 

Sherlock didn't answer, drinking his own tea and staring toward the north, where one might almost imagine one could see the Thames flowing along, stately below its bridges. His eyes were unhappy.

 

Lestrade frowned to himself, and tried again, rephrasing. "All right, mate--what's wrong?"

 

Sherlock sighed. "It's Mycroft."

 

Lestrade narrowed his eyes. For Sherlock to be in this state, it wasn't just Mycroft--it was something bad enough to break through the two brothers' habitual avoidance and mutual irritations, accessing the crazy currents of love that existed in spite of all. "Mmmm?" he murmured, encouraging further revelations. For a time he didn't think he'd get any. At last Sherlock sighed, and leaned limply against the wall, shoulders pressed to the aging brick of the building.

 

"He's been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer."

 

Lestrade whistled softly under his breath. "Not good. Have they found a Medi-were to bring him across? John can probably do it, if he won't let a stranger do it."

 

"He refuses to let a werewolf change him." He scowled. "Not even John. He says he's got enough control issues without adding full-moon madness."

 

Lestrade considered, trying to imagine Mycroft Holmes, spymaster supreme, dealing with the swirling passions of going were. He sighed. "Got a point. Vamp, then?"

 

"No. He's got--opinions. Even taking blood bank and voluntary donors into account, he is...he won't. He says he's already too close to treating his fellow human beings as prey. He's ruled out the wolves and the fangs."

 

And now Lestrade knew why Sherlock was here. Or he thought he did. He drank down a long, long draft of tea, then said, consideringly, "So. He's either got potential as a shaper--or a mage with shaping skills."

 

"Both," Sherlock said. "Not that he's developed them. What magic he uses is informational, not transformational. But the potential is there."

 

Lestrade nodded, and considered. He drank tea. He watched the sky grow lighter and lighter. He looked sideways at the man leaning against the brick building. Sherlock had lifted one leg, pushed a foot-sole hard against the wall. The fingers of his free hand lay high on his thigh, playing nervous arpeggios on the tight twill of his trousers.

 

"You know most people can't learn shifting this late," he asked.

 

Sherlock nodded, tensely. Then he said, simply, "There's no other cure. Body change--it gets rid of so much. Poisons. Scars. Infections." He gulped tea. "Tumors," he said, exhaling. "They've already metastasized. He's got months at best. Weeks."

 

Lestrade winced. He'd always liked Sherlock's older brother, when the man didn't drive him a bit crazy. Autocratic, isolated, immaculate--but with a sweetness and a startling kindness and humanity that could rip your heart to shreds if you caught sight of it unprepared. The thought of Mycroft spiralling into death with the horrible suddenness of cancer run mad in his cells was painful. But what Sherlock wanted was...

 

"It's a long shot," he said. "Not probable. It's hard to learn shifting, Sherlock. You know--I've tried to teach you and you never did get far. Expecting Mycroft to master it even as his body's falling apart on his and his life is tumbling out of control? Really improbable."

 

"But not impossible," Sherlock growled. "He won't go werewolf. He won't go vamp. That leaves learning to shift. At least he's got the genes for it." He grumbled under his breath, and said, "Whatever's left, however impossible, must be true."

 

"Maybe for deducing mysteries," Lestrade said. "This, though?"

 

"Will you try?"

 

Lestrade looked at him. He'd known Sherlock as a boy. Today, for the first time, he saw not the man--but the first hidden whisper of the old man he could become. Today Sherlock Holmes was old, and tired, and afraid for his brother.

 

"Yes," he said. "If Mycroft will let me. If Mycroft will arrange for me to have some time free from NYS to work with him."

 

It was worth it just to see old age fade from Sherlock Holmes' eyes. The younger man smiled, a rare, bright, spontaneous smile of gratitude, and he lifted the mug in silent salute. "Thanks."

 

Lestrade, knowing how rare thanks were from Holmeses, nodded...and prayed for his friend's sake that Mycroft agreed.

  
  


A day later Lestrade stood outside the side entry of Holmescroft, Sherlock beside him, and one of Mycroft's eternal black cars humming softly behind them in the porte-cochere. The door opened.

 

Not a butler, Lestrade thought. Mycroft himself.

 

Mycroft as Lestrade had never seen him: soft country tweeds of sand and mossy greens. A worn cotton checked shirt open at the neck. A moleskin waistcoat. Mycroft was both softened and eroded, something about him telling Lestrade of the illness already destroying him. Lestrade couldn't have easily said what it was--detective alertness, mage training, shaper senses. He could not have been completely sure Mycroft was a bit more bald than previously, or his skin a bit more pale and transparent, or a touch softer. He couldn't have been certain the man's life-force pulsed less vigorously. And yet--

 

And yet--

 

Mycroft was faded. Softened. Blurred.

 

Wise, aware eyes met Lestrade's, and Mycroft nodded his understanding of Lestrade's uneasy recognition. "Yes," he said, softly. "It does make a difference, if you're alert. But why don't you come in. We can talk."

 

"Talk," Sherlock muttered. "For the love of God, Mycroft, this is no time for talking. It's time for training. I brought Garvey to train you. You should get to it."

 

Mycroft gave an exasperated, but fond huff. "Really, Sherlock. I honestly doubt there's much the poor man can do for me at this stage. Yes, yes," he said, quickly, when his brother began to cavil and rant, "I'm going to try. I promised you that much. But I never had much talent for it, and now--you do know it's probably too late no matter what we do? You mustn't blame Lestrade if this doesn't work."

 

"I'll blame you," Sherlock snapped, something broken and fierce in his voice. "I will, Mike. If you die of this, I'm going to stand at your grave and blame you."

 

"I was rather hoping for cremation, actually," Mycroft said, apologetically. "No grave."

 

"I will stand in front of your urn," Sherlock snapped, eyes narrowed. Then, when Mycroft met his glare with a shrug and apologetic glance, he huffed. "Don't tell me. Scattered, not binned."

 

"It seemed very nice and traditional. 'Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.' 'All men are grass.'"

 

Lestrade hummed a bar of "Dust in the Wind." The two brothers glared at him in sync, then. He shot them a cheeky grin. "No need to worry what music to play at the scattering, eh?"

 

Mycroft snorted--a grumpy, stuffy sort of snort. But then he grinned a crooked grin, and stepped out of the doorway, ushering them in. "Come on, then."

 

"YOu get on with it," Sherlock said. "I've done the preliminary training with Lestrade. I'll just get bored and get in the way. You do get down to it." He faded, and was gone, long legs carrying him across the lawns of the estate at a fast clip.

 

"He's not comfortable with all this," Mycroft said, softly.

 

Lestrade nodded, watching the detective sloping off over the hill. "Terrified," he said. He shot Mycroft an aware look. "He doesn't want to lose you."

 

Mycroft shifted, and gestured the older detective in. "He may have no choice," he said, softly. "Death devours all lovely things." He chuckled. "Not that I'm particularly lovely. But poets don't think about that when they're writing, do they? That the old and homely die, no less than the young and the fair?"

 

"Fishing for compliments?" Lestrade laughed when Mycroft bridled at the accusation. "Come on. You're not that old. And you're not that homely. Unless your only standard for attractive is a metro-twink hipster, you're well within bounds for attractive."

 

Mycroft raised a shoulder and let it drop, as he led Lestrade down the hall. "It's rather a moot point," he said. "I've lived single. I'll die single. It's been years since I even had a regular shag on my docket." He looked down his body, then said, with sudden, shattering sorrow, "I went years fighting my weight. Now I've lost a stone in a week without trying. It's burning the flesh from my bones. The crematorium fires will come all too late for most of me--the fires of the cancer will beat them to my corpse."

 

They stepped into a room to the left of the corridor. It was a library, with French doors out onto a terrace that looked out over the rolling estate. The weather was warm. The doors were open. A soft breeze fluttered through the papers on the library desk, where Mycroft had clearly been working. He gestured. "I've planned well. Transition's going smoothly. But I do want to do all I can while I'm still...fit."

 

"You don't sound like you expect much to come of this," Lestrade said. Then gestured to himself. "Of work with me."

 

Mycroft smiled, a sweet, almost radiant smile. "Oh--I expect to enjoy it very much. I can think of few more luxurious ways to spend my final days than practicing magus skills with as charming and attractive a man as yourself. But let us be honest with each other, as we can't be with Sherlock. The odds of my learning to change completely enough to escape this cancer are poor to appalling. If I didn't learn years ago, I'm hardly likely to learn now, as my tide ebbs." He sat at the desk, then, and said, "It's rather like this last work for my division. It's not strictly necessary, but I shall take great pleasure in accomplishing it while I can. I expect I shall similarly enjoy my lessons with you. But I no more expect them to hold back death than I expect this outline for a treaty with Britograd to end war for all time."

 

Lestrade ambled over and took a place in a wing chair by the fire. "You do know it can work, don't you?"

 

"Of course," Mycroft huffed. "The science is no different to that of werewolves and vampires. Body-shifts draw on the Platonic Ideal of the body locked into one's morphological senses. We change into undamaged versions of what we imagine ourselves to be...we don't carry the wounds and diseases with us in our mental self-image. Though I am told that strongly absorbed awareness like age can carry through."

 

"Does carry through for most of us. Weres age--but more slowly than humans. Vamps...depends. There's a strain of the change-mutation that seems to block self-awareness of age, affecting morphological shifts," Lestrade said. "Some people who are deeply ill shift--and carry the illness with them through the shift." He glowered at Mycroft. "Please note I will not be impressed with you if you do so. It's hardly a sign of mental skill to screw up something that works so well in the name of consistency."

 

Mycroft, surprised, laughed. It was a sudden, light sound, and his face, which until then had looked far too worn, glowed with life and amusement. "Point taken," he said. "I suppose it would be a Holmesian failing, wouldn't it? Learn to shift so well you shift your death along with you."

 

"Don't even think it," Lestrade growled. "Try it and I'll chase you through shift till you shift clean and whole. Understand, Holmes?"

 

Mycroft smiled, then. "I understand," he said. "Now, I have to work another hour on this treaty...and then we can have lunch, and we can begin our work together."

 

It was slow work. It was thankless. It drove Lestrade around the bend. He was an instinctive changer--not unversed in theory and technique, but spontaneous and intuitive in his own approach to change. Mycroft proved to be the opposite: he needed to understand the abstract, the theoretical, the mathematical. He needed to know the science behind the science. Then, having learned that, he needed to know the techniques that allowed him to put that knowledge to use. It was slow. It was intense. It was exhausting...

 

And every day the cancer stole a bit more of his life away. It wasn't a slow cancer, but a fast one, very much like the fire he'd called it. By the end of the week he was thinner and more frail. His life seemed to flicker behind his eyes, candles being overwhelmed by a greater fire that consumed everything in his path.

 

Sherlock had been unable to bear it more than a few days.   He'd hovered at the edges, occasionally trying to join his brother and his mentor as they worked together on exercises and visualizations, or to add his own interpretation of theory. But his awareness of the cancer ate at him much as the cancer itself ate at his brother. The fourth day at the country house Lestrade followed a slow, repeated thud down one corridor after another until he found Sherlock out in the kitchen garden, pelting the high brick wall with fallen apples. Thud. Thud. Thud. His eyes were a blaze of pain and fury, as he tried to drown himself in raw action.

 

Lestrade waited until he was out of apples, then stepped into his range of sight. When he was sure he'd been noticed--though not acknowledged--he said, softly, "Go home, Sherlock. It's not helping him, and it's ripping you to pieces."

 

Sherlock stared at the tree.

 

"Sherlock, I'm serious. Go home. Call John--tell him to take you out pubbing. Or go to one of the fight clubs and learn a new fighting style. Just--get out of here."

 

"He's really a terrible prat," Sherlock said, voice raw and empty. Then he looked at Lestrade, and it was instantly clear he was fighting not to cry--furious at the need to fight it, bewildered by the intensity of the feelings. "Why does it hurt so much? He's such a prat..."

 

Lestrade clapped a hand firmly behind the other man's neck, and pulled him close, into the forehead to forehead man-embrace of team players on a footie field. "It just does, mate. Just does. Go home. I'll do what I can, yeah?"

 

Sherlock straightened. "He's not learning, is he?"

 

Lestrade shrugged. "I don't really know. He learns differently than I do. He's learning something, Sherlock. I just don't know if he's learning to change."

 

Sherlock nodded.

 

If Mycroft didn't learn to change, he would die. There was no other obvious answer.

 

"I've called a vamp I know," Sherlock said, not looking at Lestrade. "He'll break the law and change the unwilling. For a price."

 

Lestrade growled. "No. Doesn't work that way. Sherlock, the unwilling don't rise. You know that. They don't rise--or they rise and walk out into the sun. Or into the Thames. You can't change the unwilling, mate."

 

"He wants to live."

 

"Not if it means going were or vamp."

 

"I don't care," Sherlock said. "I don't care."

 

Lestrade considered--saw the pain and fear and strain on Sherlock's face. "Yeah, you do, sunshine," he said. "Or it wouldn't hurt like this." He started for the door back into the big manor house. "Go home. I'll let you know if anything changes."

 

Sherlock was gone by dinner, leaving Lestrade alone with Mycroft at the round oak table in the "least dining room," where Lestrade wolfed his way into a shepherd's pie Mycroft only picked at.

 

"Eat," Lestrade said. "You need your strength."

 

Mycroft considered, clearly questioning the statement, then sighed, and took a forkful. "YOu're right," he said, softly. "Dying is hard work."

 

"So's shifting," Lestrade growled.

 

Mycroft nodded. "Either one. Yes."

 

Every day Lestrade started with shift exercises--a flow of form changes he performed out on the terrace outside the library, looking out over the back acres of the estate. As he danced his forms, he could see a lake and a Georgian folly in the shape of a classic Greek temple. He moved from dog to fox, from fox to rat, from rat to kestrel, from kestrel to pheasant, from pheasant to dreig, from dreig to gryph...

 

He wanted Mycroft to join him. Instead the man sat out, morning after morning, watching Lestrade dance the forms as him himself drank tea.

 

"What would you change to first?" Lestrade asked, pushing down anger as he tossed a towel behind his sweating neck at the end of the exercise. "Dog? Cat? Horse?"

 

Mycroft's eyes grew distant. "Dreig," he said, tones dark. "Scales and talons and hunger. You know that's what they called me? The Ice Wyrm. Snow Drake." He looked at Lestrade, then, coming back from his distant thoughts. "I would change to a dreig," he said, voice shivery and bleak. "You might not like me that way."

 

"I'd change to dreig to match," Lestrade said, calm and assured. "Dreig, gryph, sphinx. You shift it, I'll follow."

 

Mycroft considered. Then, reluctantly, he nodded. "Perhaps I wouldn't hurt you, then," he said.

 

"You were afraid you would?"

 

He looked away as he straightened. "No matter what, however this turns out--someone will be hurt," he said. "I had been hoping I could restrict it to just me. But it's become obvious that's not possible."

 

Lestrade caught the other man's elbow as he started to move away. "You're loved, Holmes. That means you can't go without hurting people."

 

"Or stay without hurting them, either."

 

"That remains to be seen," Lestrade said...and when Mycroft walked away and closed the door to the library, he began to plan.

 

He pushed. He teased. He chided, sparking anger in Mycroft, until he thought only illness and exhaustion kept the other man from driving him from the estate. That and a hope he knew Mycroft didn't dare express.

 

"You can change," Lestrade growled, meaning more than just shifting. "You can live."

 

"Implausible."

 

"No more than anyone else doing it."

 

"In general people do not change."

 

"Mages do,"  Lestrade growled, "and no matter how off the beaten track your skills are, you're a mage."

 

"A dark one," Mycroft assured him.

 

Lestrade thought of Mycroft as light, though. A glowing beacon. A candle guttering in the wind. A sunrise over a battlefield, offering a new chance for peace and redemption--or at least a chance at victory at arms. A sunset glowing through a wine glass, offering contentment.

 

"Dark ain't nothing but the moment before the curtain goes up," Lestrade said, and ran his student--his weak, wearly student--through another set of change exercises.

 

It was in the dark of night it happened. It was in the last set of exercises of the day. It was when Lestrade had almost given up hope. Mycroft was too thin.  Too wan. Too weak, now.

 

Tomorrow would be the time to call Sherlock and admit that it was over. Time either for the illegal vamp to bite the unwilling Mycroft--or for Mycroft's few friends and family members to steel themselves for his death.

 

"Change, you damned stubborn bastard," Lestrade gasped, worn himself from repeated changes--and, worse, repeated hours poised on the edge of change without changing.

 

Mycroft, sitting in an armchair by the empty library fireplace, glared at Lestrade. He panted.

 

His eyes were so deep, Lestrade thought. His skull showed through, a foreshadowing of death. He moved so slowly.

 

"I am tired," he hissed at the older shifter.  "Can't you understand? I am so tired..."

 

"Then change," Lestrade said. Then he paused. "You change one way or another," he said. "Dead, or different. You're going to be dead in the end. Try different now--or are you too afraid?"

 

Fury blossomed in those deathshead eyes. Then the change came.

 

"Dreig," Lestrade gasped.

 

Not, though, the Ice Wyrm. Fire drake, he was--ash and ember, lava and molten steel. Flowing serpentine over his own coiled loops, wings folded down tight, umbrella-ribbed and sleek. Scales hissed and rasped over each other. Bone-thin arms reached out, tipped with clawed hands, long finger-agile digits ending in talons of crimson glass.

 

"Asssssshhhhhhhh," the fire drake hissed. "Asssssssshhhhhhh." His head darted toward Greg's face, maw opening to reveal a hungry blaze of orange tongue and throat, and spine-like teeth, delicate and long and sharp.

 

Greg tumbled back, gasping. "Mycroft..."

 

"Asssshhhhhh," the dreig hissed yet again. Its eyes were burning, luminous sun-gold. It flowed like magma off the armchair, talons stuttering in the wool carpet, catching, bending finger-claws back.

 

Mycroft was sick, Lestrade thought, and he could feel the cancer reformed in the dreig. It owned this shape. It owned this Mycroft, as it had come to own the last....

 

"No," Lestrade gasped. "No. Shift, damn it." Then he forced himself to shift--not human, but a storm ariel.

 

The elemental forms were hard to think in...but this gave him cold and wet to slam into the fire wyrm. It flinched back from a torrent of rain, spattering into his face. The Mycroft-beast raised its umbrella wings and wailed.

 

"Change," Lestrade bellowed, all thunder and hail. "Change!"  He threw his storm against the wrym.

 

There was a wash of steam and fog, and out of it raced a raging manticore, scorpion tail thrusting. Lestrade shifted, too, fast, fast, darting and dabbing, a leopard playing wiht the wicked beast. "Change."

 

It was a dance. It was a duel. It was death--and death evaded.

 

It worked. Lestrade wasn't sure when Mycroft first shifted to a form the cancer didn't define...a form that wasn't an expression of his own illness and destruction. He could never afterward say what form met some hidden ideal of wholeness for Mycroft, too pure and living for him to carry the cancer with him. All he knew was that at some point the flow of forms became clean, and alive, and healthy.

 

At the very end they came to rest together, somewhere out on the hills, in a spinney of pines: a pewter fox and a red, curled together.

 

The silver fox felt the warmth and fire of the red fox, sleeping flank to flak beside him. He grinned a vulpine grin. Later, in human form, he'd think complicated thoughts. Now, though, he just thought contented ones. He leaned over and washed his change-friend's face, mentally laughing at the ears that flicked and the whiskers that twitched as his tongue caressed away care and weariness.

 

For tonight it was enough that Mycroft Holmes had changed, and chosen life over death.


	2. Attempt to Revise into Original Fantasy Fic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ok. I'm trying to shift the story I already posted into a fantasy world I've already written in. Most recent post would be when I put up the one about Lord Peter and Hang Goodfellow killing the dragon. This is the same approximate local and the same period. 
> 
> I'm moving Sherlock and Mycroft into Jago and Morgan--half brothers, magic users, and recently at the heart of a spy ring that protected the West Counties and Wales during THEIR version of WWI. A very different WWI, needless to say. Griff/Greg was part of their team-a countryman, with his own history and magic. This is how it starts. I'm hoping given time I will be able to weave this and several other stories together into a single meshed novel. See what you think of the introduction...if you like it, lemme know.

When Griffith saw the tall figure moping in the back garden, smoking a fag and kicking sullenly at the chopping block for all the world as though he owned the place, he sighed…but his heart rose, too. It had been months since he’d last seen the boy…

No, he reminded himself firmly. Jago was a man, now. It was long, long years since he’d roamed the levels with the lad tagging behind, trying to track the untrackable. They’d been to war together. It was time to stop thinking of him as a boy.

He tapped at the window of the croft with one curved knuckle. Jago’s head came up. His tumble of curls fell around his shoulders and he turned back to nod at Griffith. Then he flicked aside the stub of the fag into the soaked, dew-drenched verge around the yard, and pantomimed “Tea?,” resting one index finger across the tip of the other in a signal the team had come to use instinctively, in the hours when they dared make no noise, or call attention to themselves.

Griff nodded, and hoisted two heavy earthenware mug—near tankards. He set the kettle on the hob by the kitchen fire, tossed on pine and apple logs, and rumbled lazily around the kitchen, putting together the sort of breakfast he knew from long association the boy—

 

The _man_ would enjoy. A cottage loaf brought over by his aunt Vicki…he’d not dared ask where she’d got it from, as the odds were good as not she’d nicked it from someone’s window sill, or even worse, walked into an empty kitchen and collected what appealed to her. A wedge of cheese whose provenance he could testify was unblemished, as he’d paid for the half-wheel himself at Dai Cheesemonger’s not a week before. Four small, mottled apples that smelled of Eden before ever Eve sinned—and that went a long way to explaining why the poor lass hadn’t been able to resist. Who could turn from a perfume like that, all sweet and tart and floral and fruity, a million times prettier than the warty, netted skin with its grit of blush over green.

Griff always swore the fruit from his trees was the ugliest in the West Country, and on into Wales, but the fairest on the tongue. He’d never known Jago to argue.

He slopped rich milk into the two mugs, and dolloped in heavy spoons of honey from his own hives, knowing already that Jago liked his tea fit to stand on its own. When the kettle boiled he filled the pot, piled the meal onto a homely beer tray from the nearby pub, and made his way out into the tangles of his own back garden, listening as the thrush sang in the hedgerow across the lane.

“Here you go, lad. The way you like it.”

Jago grabbed up a mug and sucked tea down, not looking at Griff.

Griff studied him, drinking down his own tea. The lad really had aged, he thought. For years he’d seemed suspended in time. His coffee-and-cream skin had been smooth, his features young and elvin-weird. His mouth had been full and soft. His cheeks were so high they almost seemed to push his eyes up toward his dark brows.

He looked what he was. What he was had no polite name. His mother had been married to the local squire. Years after she’d given the man his son and heir, she’d taken a lover—a dark-eyed Moor, some said. Others claimed she’d called up a djinn and born the demon’s get. Still others said it was a Sikh chappy who’d kept the books for the estate.

Griff didn’t know, and didn’t think he rightly cared. Jago was Jago. Older now. His high brow finally coming into its own, as he wrestled the wild tumble of curls into control. Brackets forming around those full, mobile lips. As beautiful now as he’d been before, though in a different way.

Griff had no desire to bed the man—and, yet, a sidewise glance from dark-on-dark eyes, and a flicker of a grin could jerk his balls and leave him breathless.

This morning the man was too restless to play that game, though. He drank tea, champed down apples and cheese and bread. Paced the chip-strewn space where Griff chopped his wood and killed his chickens.

“I saw Herself riding the road this morning,” he said at last. “Up-along.” His sharp chin jutted toward the ridge, with the old road running along the crest line. “On that damned Adalusian stallion, just as the sun came up. I swear, it’s ears burned red as the light shone through them.”

Griff grumbled. “The horse needs exercise, now as much as ever.”

“Morgan’s dying,” Jago said, cutting the words tight and crisp.

Griff took a sup of the tea.. After a time, he said, “You have that direct?”

“The Queen of Air and Darkness isn’t going to admit the end’s staring him in the eye.” He huffed, angrily. “I may be his half-brother—but that only makes him less likely to tell me something’s wrong. You know it as well as I do.”

“What do you want me to do, lad?” Griff asked, hitching a hip on the stone wall that rimmed the garden. “Mor ain’t any more likely to tell me than you, in the end.” He shook his head. “Less, when all’s reckoned. I’m naught but the earth under that stallion’s hooves, when Mor figures it all in. A cold one, that one.”

Jago shook his head, and muttered irritated words under his breath. Griff decided he ought to be grateful the younger man made the effort at tact. Not that it helped. They’d had years in close contact. Filling in the blanks left by the muttering was child’s play.

“Mor’s the squire,” he said to Jago, as though continuing an old argument.

“You’re the one he listens to,” Jago said, stepping into his lines with ease. “He may keep his distance, but it’s you he hears.”

“You, too,” Griff said. “You first. You’re his brother.”

“Half brother.”

“That mattered to your old man, not to Mor. He’s done right by you, hasn’t he?”

“If you call Harrow and Cambridge ‘doing right,;” Jago said, bitterly.

“Drafted you into the fairy raid,” Griff said, laughing, then quoted easily, “’Up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen, we dare not go a-hunting for fear of little men.’ Played Odin’s ravens a merry game, we did, didn’t we, lad?” He thought back to the recently ended war, and smiled ruefully. “Ah, it’s my last great venture, I daresay. Word from on high is I’m like to be promoted, hung with decorations like a Christmas tree—and handed over to work in the local con-sta-bu-lary.” He made each syllable ring out, scorn in every tone. “Retired with full honors, yeah? But it was a mighty venture the Queen put together, wasn’t it?”

“Something’s wrong,” Jago said again. “Something’s wrong with Mor. The war’s over, Griff. He shouldn’t be riding out on the white road.” He swallowed down the last of his tea. Griff watched the man’s Adam’s apple bob and jerk as he downed each gulp. He shut his eyes. “Sonofabitch,” he said, then, softly. “Sonofabitch. My brother’s dying. I could swear it. Griff, he’s dying.”

Griff leaned his elbows on his knees and thought, quietly. “You sure?” he asked. “Is this a guess—or a geas? Is it upon you to know, or just a hunch?”

The younger man straightened, and all remaining sense of his boyhood fell away. Wind down from the ridge stirred the hair he’d combed back straight off his high brow, teasing loose a few curled strands to flutter against his tawny skin. “I found him riding,” he said, in a voice Griff had heard before, in the dead of night, in the heart of a calling, as the Little Men had protected England’s Western Shore from Odin’s Viking submariners and from the All Father’s Valkyrie Aces. “I saw him riding on the white track in the first dawn. His mount was white with red ears. His tabard was written on in blood. He passed and never saw me.” He came out of the trance, and looked at Griff. “He’s dying. I don’t know what. I don’t know how. But The Queen’s dying, and we have to save him.”

Griff sighed heavily, and considered—the man, the situation, the long and wounded past. He shook his head. “Reckon that’s going to be a challenge,” he said. “Morgan would rather die than beg—and burn in hell rather than explain.”

“Too bad,” Jago growled. “For once he’s out of luck. I’m not losing him.” He looked at his old mentor, and said, softly, “He’s mine, Griff. I may hate him forever. That’s my right. But he’s not dying without my say-so.”

If Jago had been anyone but who he was, Griff would have humored him—and let it go. But Jago was Jago—the Queen’s mad half-brother, the mixed-blood mage. If anyone could beat the Queen—Morgan Lananshee, squire of Low Alphame and master of the Cauldron springs, spymaster of the West during the recent war, it was Jago.


End file.
